"Its not about how many followers you have, its about how engaged the people on your social network are. The more engaged your followers are the most likely they will share, promote and purchase more!"

Social media is the number one networking tool and promotional tool to not only reach your customers in real time but to understand your customer better.

Victoria Secret is the number one retailer brand on Facebook, with over 26 million Facebook followers.

In a social media world were people receive and count their likes; in business we are looking less for likes and more on creating a conversation worth our customers being involved in and worth being shared!

The Four Social Media Metrics:

1. Conversation

As a business owner, or freelancer, you want to have a social network of customers who are champions of your products.

These champions are your customers who are continually satisfied by your products or services, so much so that they want to share this excitement with others. These champions are the ones who will comment on your photos first and will be keen on participating in promotions or social media contests.

When measuring the conversation on your social media posts, you want to measure the quality of the conversation that is occurring. You also want to measure the positive vs. sentiment, to effectively determine the brand perception of people commenting on the post.

These negative and positive sentiments can be used to determine the Net Promoter Score and give you a better idea on the likelihood of customers recommending your product or services to others

The better and more enriching the conversation, the most likely customers will recommend, promote and rebuy your products or services.

You can also gain insights early on about your customers pertaining to their wants and needs, preferences, personalities and lifestyles in order to better adjust campaigns or product offerings.

The challenges are you have no control over the content of the conversation, no way to measure across all channels individually and an be difficult to get people involved in starting or maintaining a conversation

Victoria Secret's Facebook page averages 110+ pages of comments per post. As you can also see, Victoria Secret is very responsive to comments on their social media page - further encouraging customers to post and also manage consumer backlash.

2. Amplification

You're going to want to have people share the posts you put out on social media, whether it is sharing contests, promotions or content in general. This allows you to leverage your business with the influence they have over their own social media network followers. This is were you will measure the real "reach of your social media campaign.

Remember, you want to have people sharing your content who use your product or share similar characteristics with their friends or other people they can influence to try your product or service too.

It is more than likely that the people sharing the content are friends with people who have similar shared interests or characteristics that influence their likeliness to try your products or services.

The challenges are you don't have any control over the "message" that's being shared amongst these platforms.

Another challenge is you may not know the scope of their influence, this is particularly true with bloggers or other social influential people.

Victoria Secret's Facebook page averages 150+ shares per post.

3. Applause

These are the likes you get on your posts. This can help you learn what your audience likes and dislikes, help your content stand out over others' content and increase your visibility on newsfeeds.

The challenges are that some people may like your content for the visual aspects and not necessarily for the message of the content or the brand.

Victoria Secret's Facebook page averages 1000+ likes per post

4. Economic Value

Reflects the Return on Investment for using coupons and monetizes the social media relationship in a way that upper-level manager likes.

The challenges are it does not measure the long-term economic value and economic value is skewed higher than normal when contests or promotional campaigns are used.

There,fore focus less on the number of coupons or increase on sales when managing social media campaigns, the focus should be on the long-term as social media tends to last longer and encourage future purchases opposed to consumption by customers right now!